LESSON SEVEN: To Be, or Knot to Be

Do apes have culture?

Playing video games, listening to Beyonce, taking selfies - do primates have rich inner lives?

MONKEY AROUND: Do apes have culture? From the Sydney Morning Herald comes the answer, sort of, as it turns out to be complicated. Certain apes may be a part of a conservative tribe where innovation is scant and traditional ways of doing things are rarely supplanted. This is clearly cultural mores at work, unless it is functional fixedness instead. It is difficult to understand the motive of creatures who can’t explain themselves. Regardless, I like this definition of fixedness: “an innate inability to do things differently.” Perhaps it is also a primate inability to do things differently? 

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GET GRUMPY: To properly channel your inner curmudgeon, get a few pointers from Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man: http://www.hulu.com/ watch/271497. Progress? Flibbity floo! 

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THINK LIKE A STONE: Alexander (2004). Oliver Stone’s one hundred and fifty-five-million-dollar epic about the con- queror of ninety percent of the world, was skipped at the theatre by ninety percent of movie goers. The few who did see it didn’t think it was so great, calling the movie ambitious and risky but unfinished, unwieldy and flawed. Historians hated it because it was inaccurate and directed by Oliver Stone, which is often redundant. Luckily for you none of the endless stream of names, places or dates narrated by Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy will be on the final exam. Stone created the film as a historical opus to explain Alexander’s kinder, gentler side but you don’t have to use it that way. Instead, utilize it purely for its visual entertainment value and to ask yourself if any ruler with flowing locks as bad as Colin Farrell’s could truly conquer the world?